Has anyone ever used the BusinessWeek program to buy and sell? I had a free subscription to the service for a while and did some paper trades but never actually pulled the trigger on anything. My broker has me in a good allocation of mutual funds and I was looking to just play a little with some equities (instead of going to Atlantic City).

The only time i was going to dabble in stocks was back in the 80's with Nastech Pharmaceuticals. I was going to purchase 1,000,000 shares at a penny a piece but my attorney said NO. Now look up that stock and tell me what it is worth now. Yes I screwed up royally

Hmm if you bought it on the advice of reading O'Neil then you better be ON TOP of it. He is a momentum investor, and you had better of bought on at least three signals and one of them was buying on 3 green lights with him DJIA, SPX, and NAS, don't hold that sucker for longer than 2 weeks (The absolute most) with momentum driven purchases.

Uptrend is higher lows and higher highs - draw the uptrend line thru the lowsDowntrend lower lows and lower highs - draw the downtrend line thru the highs

Buy pull backs to the uptrend line; short rallies to the downtrend line

To start you needs at least 25k to open a day trading account. More than 4 rount trip trades in 5 days and the SEC considers you a day trader. You get 4:1 margin but must maintain 25k in your account.

If you do less than 4 trades a week, you are not a day trader, you are an investor and get 2:1 margin. Minimum for account is low like 1-2k.

To start realistically you need 50-100k to trade with. Because you are starting you will lose most of it before you start to make money, so 100k is better. And I think it is better to do it from time to time and work a regular job inbetween because it takes a long time to get good enough to make money consistantly and it can drive you crazy in the beginning losing all the time.

Daytrading is too advanced for me, investing would be better then. What exactly does a 2:1 margin mean? Can you tell me more about being an investor and what it means? Are you doing that or daytrading?